10001110100110101
Pain. That's all I felt as I rolled around on the grass next to the road (and next to a steep cliff for that matter). My mind was so occupied by the signals coming from my foot that I was unable to respond to the few people who actually came to find out what happened. I knew pretty well what happened. It seemed as if time stood still for just a moment, before I popped back into reality and immediately fell to the ground.
One of the St. John's Ambulance (SJA) workers who was originally tending the girl who got hit by a waterballon (who now had a couple of paramedics watching her) came over to assess the damage. She asked the standard questions, "Where does it hurt?", "Can you feel your toes?", *poke* "Can you feel this?", etc. None of my nerves seemed to be severed (little comfort at the time), but they weren't sure exactly what I had injured. I didn't think I broke a bone since, despite the pain, it didn't "feel" broken. But how could I be sure?
Moments later, one of the paramedics came by to check on how I was doing. He asked the same questions that the SJA lady asked, and I gave the same replies. Just to double check I guess. The paramedic then asked the SJA lady to grab some ice and something to wrap my foot in. She came back moments later with a blanket and some ice, which felt bitterly cold against my quickly swelling foot. They wrapped it up and let me find some comfortable position as they asked if anyone could drive me to the hospital. Apparently, it was against regulation to have more than one patient in an ambulance at one time, so they wanted to see if I could be brought to the hospital separately. Unfortunately, we had gotten to the park by bus (school busses in fact) and the available transportation was back at the village. After a couple of minutes of weighing the consequences, the paramedics decided to drive me to the hospital in the ambulance instead. (Whee! My first time!) After checking to see if there was anything I needed (my stuff, which was close by fortunately), and after loading up the girl, they drove the ambulance in front of me and helped me on.
I realized, just before boarding the ambulance, that I had not brought my wallet along with me. I didn't think I'd need it since there was nothing to buy, and.. well, nothing I'd need my wallet for. Furthermore, I couldn't remember my health card number! (Well, I sort of did, but not really.) That did not bode very well for me, but I mentioned something about it, and they told me not to worry.
The ambulance ride itself wasn't very eventful. They asked me some pretty basic questions (What's your name? Where are you from? etc.) and filled out some sort of report. I looked around at all of the medical equipment and sundry that lined the inside of the back of the vehicle, and realized how cramped it was back there with the stretcher. It was also hard to see outside since the rear windows were small, and the opening to the front of the ambulance was also fairly meager. I spent the time talking with the girl (who's name was Sally), and the paramedics. We did the usual small talk before arriving at the hospital about ten minutes later. (We weren't in any sort of rush.)
I had wondered what sort of injury Sally had sustained, and they told me that it was some sort of hyperextension of the neck. That sounded pretty bad. I has asked her how it all happened and was rewarded by a first hand glimpse of the incident from the victim's point of view. (Which isn't really all too much since she didn't remember much of it.)
After we had arrived in the emergency ward in the hospital, one of the paramedics brought out a wheelchair (Another first!) and helped me in. He told me to go to the front desk to get checked in and then wait to be seen by a doctor. So I got wheeled into the lobby, where a dozen or so people were waiting to be served, or waiting for someone else to be looked at. Nobody paid much attention to me as I was rolled up to the receptionist and answered her questions (the same ones that the paramedic asked on the ambulance ride to the hospital, I guess to triple-check). I was then given a new pack of ice for the foot (as the original ice had melted long ago) and told to wait in the lobby to get registered.
When I rolled myself out into the lobby, I saw Heather, one of the organizers there (the one who was talking with the paramedics.. oh, I never mentioned that.. oh well, she was talking with the paramedics). She asked how I was doing, yada, yada, and we talked for a while. I sorta hinted that she should go and check out Sally because her injury looked much more life threatening than mine. (Neck as opposed to foot? You choose.) So she went off and looked for her while I sat around wondering what to do.
The wheelchair that I was in must've been pretty old, because the chair has been worn down so much that my butt fit right into the grooves in the seat. This was okay for a little while, but it's hard to stay comfortable because they aren't very cushioned. Also, due to the ruts in the seat, it was hard to sit in any other position for long without getting very sore from the funny shape of the grooves. Man, I'd hate to be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. How the heck to people stay comfortable in those things?
Eventually I was called up to get registered, so I wheeled myself up to the room and the girl behind the desk asked me what my health card number was. I didn't know for sure, so she asked me a couple of questions and called into.. somewhere and asked for my OHIP number. Voila! A few moments later, she was printing something out, had me registered, and put a band around my wrist. She told me to pick up my registration card before I left and to wait to be called. Yay.
I found a magazine to read, watched the sports for a little while, and eventually came up with this brilliant idea to have my picture taken for posterity. So I asked this elderly man, who was sort of looking in my direction anyway, to take a picture of me in the wheelchair. After taking the picture (which I hope comes out) he asked me how I got injured, and I went through the story about the vélobus,
"Well, you see, there's this thirty-three seat peddle vehicle known as a vélobus.."
So I asked what he was doing there, and he told me that one of his friends had cancer. That sort of put my injury in perspective since, well, my foot injury is nothing compared to having cancer. We talked for a bit longer before his friend came out and they went home. I was left alone to wait in the lobby again until they called my name.
Call my name they did, and they directed me to go to one of the rooms down the hall and wait for a doctor to see me. I rolled myself down to the room and realized that it was one of the few rooms that didn't have one of those automatic doors. After some fancy foot placement and chair maneuvers, I was able to squeeze my way into the room. The room was pretty full, and I found some dead space next to one of the doors to wait.
The main drag about hospitals is not usually the treatments or the diagnosis. It's usually the wait. The agonizingly long and boring wait. I had waited around an hour in the lobby before moving into one of the waiting rooms to wait even longer. I was there for a couple of hours before being looked at by one of the doctors. While I was waiting, I looked around at some of the other patients and wondered what sort of ailments were bothering them. One of the patients was this girl who seemed very bored. I probably should've talked to her, but I was in a watching mood. (Besides, after I heard pap smear, I decided to back away..)
Heather came by every now and then to see how I was doing and give me updates on Sally's condition. It seemed as if she was rushed ahead of me to get x-rays taken of her neck to see if there were any bones broken or if there was any serious damage to her neck. So basically, she didn't know.
After she had left to go keep a vigil with Sally, I continued watching the other patients (and their companions) in the room. (You can tell who the patients were by looking for those wrist bands.) I watched as, one by one, they were called by the doctor to be examined. Some spoke English, some French, but they all seemed to have something different wrong with them. The bored girl started talking with one of the guys next to her saying that she had been waiting five hours to be looked at. Five hours! Oi.. I had so much to look forward to.
We were supposed to have a formal ending ceremony at the end of the day, and I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to make it. I wasn't particularly interested in the talks or the speeches, but I was a little worried about missing out on the food. It had been a number of hours since lunch and I was already famished. (I had burned off a lot of calories that day.) As the hours ticked by, the chances that I was going to be able to make it in time for dinner diminished, and even after I finally got looked at, the doctor told me to take some pills and to go have some x-rays taken.
As I didn't know where the x-ray area was, he was going to send an orderly to take me there. I was immediately given a couple of bright blue pills to swallow (apparently pain-killers) but I had to wait for the orderly. I spent the time looking at the piece of paper the doctor gave me (to give to the x-ray people) and try to figure out what the heck he wrote down. What caught my eye was the name of the injury,
Hyper Dorsiflection
Cool. Quite a number of minutes passed by when Heather returned asking me how I was doing. I told her that I needed x-rays and that I was waiting for someone to take me there. She knew where the x-ray room was (as she was there with Sally) so figured that she'd be able to take me there. So we had to wait until she could find someone to talk to to ask if she could take me to the x-ray room. *whew* You really have to be patient at a hospital.
So we were off, and fortunately, there were only a couple of people waiting to have x-rays taken. I needed to take a leak (as I hadn't for quite some time and drank lots of water), so I was brought near a one person bathroom and I hopped in and did my duty. After I had hopped back into the chair, I realized that I had aggravated my injury, it was very painful for only a little while, and then all of the pain seemed to dissappear. I guess the pain-killers had taken effect.
While I was waiting to have my x-rays taken, Sally (sans stretcher and neck brace) walked up to greet us. She looked fine, although a little distraught that they didn't find anything wrong with her. So Heather talked to her for a while to cheer her up when I got the call to be looked at. I talked a bit with the two girls manning (womanning?) the x-ray machine while they told me to twist and turn my foot this way and that to get the perfect shot. (Turn a bit more.. a bit more.. a bit more.. *snap* Perfect!)
As the pain-killers had already taken effect, I didn't feel all to bad. (A bit drowsy maybe.) After the x-rays were taken, I waited outside while they developed the film so I talked to this girl who was lying on the stretcher with nobody attending her. She said that she might have diabetes. Yummy. Everybody's coming out a winner it seems.
I was given the x-rays and after a bit of confused wandering, we went back to the original waiting room to have a doctor take a final look at my foot. Sally had already left to go to what remained of the formal dinner while Heather stayed with me. The wait wasn't as long as the first time in the room although it was still about an hour long, and we spent most of the time talking about food, and what sort of food we would get if we couldn't make it for the dinner. I suggested Dunn's smoked meat poutine which is so bad for you that it was worth the foot injury. *drool*
There was another person in a wheelchair next to me, so I asked her what happened. It seemed like she broke her wrist while rollerblading. Ouch. If you want to go to a place for a pick-me-up, don't go to a hospital.
I also took a look at the x-rays that I had been given and checked to see if I had any broken bones. I'm no doctor, but it didn't seem as if anything bad had happened to any of the bones in that area, so that gave me some sort of relief. Mind you, very tiny fractures would be hard to see, so I still wanted a professional opinion.
When the doctor finally came to check on me, he said that he couldn't find any broken bones, and that chances were that my tendons were stretched or torn. He told me that it should take a couple of weeks for the swelling to go down and a couple of months before I become fully healed. Yay.
He then told me that he was going to prescribe some pain-killers and to have me fitted for crutches before I left. So a number of moments later, I was called in and one of the orderlies went through checking to see if they could find me some crutches that would be comfortable. While he was doing that, I peeked at the doctor's desk and saw that he had some sort of medical manual open to a very interesting section: viral hepatitis. Time to put on the rubber gloves.
I talked to the orderly for a bit, to find out exactly what sort of injury I had. (It was actually called hyper dorsiflection - ligamentous.) He showed me how to properly use the crutches and dressed my wound. He took off the ice (well, it was warm water by then) and wrapped the rest of my foot in a tensor bandage. He gave me my new crutches, and I was off!
It wasn't until then when I realized how serendipitous it was that the ambulance was already there. Mind you, if the ambulance wasn't there, I probably wouldn't have injured my foot, but anything could've happened. Furthermore, it solved the problem of me not bringing any formalwear. The last night for Future Trek was to have a formal ending ceremony.. somewhere fancy, and have speeches, and a nice (semi-)formal dinner. The most formal thing I brought were jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved shirt. Yeah, yeah, small consolation.
Another thing that I realized was that I was pretty lucky that I was injured on the Ontario side of the border. We spent half of our time on the Quebec side, and if I had been injured there, I don't know if OHIP(Ontario Health Insurance Plan) would've covered it. Lucky I guess? Yeah, yeah, I'm grasping at straws here!
Anyway, I had this weird déjà vu experience just as I was leaving that area. I felt as if I had seen that part of the hospital many years ago..
As it was too late to go to the dinner, we grabbed a cab to head back to the village. Heather called in to ask someone to go and pick up some poutine for me (*drool*) and gave me the quick version tour of Ottawa (which we had to drive through to make it back to the village.
Because of the rain and wind that was going on outside while we were inside, the conversation turned towards talking about the weather. After talking about the sucky weather that we had been having all weekend, she told me that the tents were not originally supposed to have any wooden flooring. It was only after a huge storm that literally flooded the park that the organizers decided to put something on the ground so that our tents wouldn't float away during a bad storm. That's nice to know.
Once I had gotten back to the village, I used the crutches and made my way to the admin tent where I was to wait for my food to arrive. Heather told me, "Don't be a hero." and ask for help if I really needed it. Eh, I thought I could make it across so I stubbornly hopped through the village (and after a number of breaks) made it to the tent.
People working there looked at me and asked what had happened.. the usual stuff. There was one exception. One of the guys asked me which tent I was from. I told him twenty-nine. He told me that I was really lucky since tent twenty-five (two tents down from us) was literally blown over during the rainstorm that day and everything in the tent got completely drenched. They had to move everything into the cafeteria tent while the contractors came to reposition the tent. Wow.. that would've been pretty bad news if it was my tent..
Afterward, whenever people asked which tent I belonged to, I told them, "Not twenty0five".
The poutine arrived a few minutes before everybody started coming back from the dinner, I ate pretty quickly and sat around for a while before heading back to the tent. While I was making my way there, I bumped into a couple of guys from our tent who were milling around. Our leader bellowed, "What happened to you?" and I went through my velobus story. I was told that they wanted to take a group picture of the people in the tent and couldn't seem to find me at the dinner (nor did they find someone else but I didn't know about that until later). Ah well, I told them to grab everyone and that they could find me in the tent.
I was too tired to do anything else, so I went back into the tent and went to sleep. Don came by to see how I was doing, and after giving him money to pay back Heather for the drugs (since she went out to get the prescription) I went to bed.
Wednesday, July 19, 2000 at 03:29:50 (UTC)
Hmm.. the second "half" was very technical, very tedious, somewhat anti-climatic. You should've talked about those girls more. I want my money back!
Hwan